Our View: Grab a good book and read

Thursday

Jul 6, 2017 at 11:42 AMJul 6, 2017 at 11:42 AM

Summertime and the livin’ is easy.

Summer is the season to relax, kick back and enjoy the sunny and often-humid weather. Your thing could be hanging out at the beach, frolicking at a local park, taking a much-needed vacation or simply chilling out at home.

The body needs rest, and on occasion the mind needs rest. However, we shouldn’t take it too far.

This is a message specifically for students.

Over the summer vacation, students who fail to read a book or two could slip a few notches, and when school restarts in the fall, their teachers may have to spend the first few weeks re-teaching what was already taught, especially for students who were already struggling.

Elementary students' performance can fall by about a month during the summer, according to a study conducted by the RAND Corporation, and the decline is far worse for lower-income students. A 2007 study from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that summer slide causes 80 percent of the reading achievement gap between students of higher and lower economic status.

Most disturbing, it appears that summer learning loss is cumulative.

This problem impacts all of our wallets. A Forbes Magazine article pegs the cost to reteach the forgotten material at more than $1,500 per student each year, or more than $18,000 over the course of a K-12 career.

While many districts offer summer enrichment programs to help combat the problem, one of the best resources is the town library. Just about all local libraries have summer reading programs complete with special themes, and prizes for finishing a certain number of books.

Matt Perry, outreach coordinator for the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, recently told Wicked Local's Gerry Tuoti research shows students who read four or more books over the summer perform better on reading comprehension tests when they return to school in the fall. That prompted the Board of Library Commissioners to launch the “What’s your four?” campaign.

The campaign encourages children to read four books during summer vacation.

Letting youths pick out their own library books often makes them more engaged, Perry said. It’s important, he added, for parents to read to their young children and for kids to see their parents reading on their own.

Can’t make it to the library? Pick up an old magazine, newspaper or grab a book from your bookshelf that you've already read. A great online resource to encourage reading habits is the Reading Is Fundamental website, where parents can find calendars for new reading ideas every day of the summer (rif.org/literacy-resources/calendars).

Read, read, read! Please don’t let your brain turn to mush this summer. Pick up a book and read.